COVID And Money

Yesterday I posted about the Hunter Biden venture capital firm's investment in a for-profit startup that worked with the Wuhan lab to perform gain-of-function research. The image above is a screen shot that comes from another Natalie Winters piece in the National Pulse, dated yesterday, where she refers to a 2018 presentation at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill by Ralp;h Baric, a close colleague of Peter Daszak, entitled “Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!”

In yesterday's post I offered half-crazy speculation that anti-computer virus tech tycoon John McAfee was suspected of creating the computer viruses for which his company sold the antidotes only as a way to suggest such opportunities conceivably exist. Natalie Winters seems to be on a similar wavelength.

The slide outlines what type of stocks and industries surged during the Ebola outbreak, which he uses to extrapolate financial advice on how to “make money in the next pandemic.”

“I wanted to give you good news. There are winners out there, right? So if you ever want to be prepared and make money in the next pandemic, if that’s what you want to do, buy stock in Hazmat suit makers and protective clothing or companies that make antiviral drugs for that particular pandemic,” he notes.

Baric adds that the aforementioned sectors and stocks would “probably do pretty well” before highlighting that “there are actually mutual funds for pandemic preparedness.”

. . . “There is an opportunity for people to have political gain, financial gain, and personal gain during times of social upheaval, and that will probably occur,” he adds.

In yesterday's post, Winters uncovers a colleague of Ralph Baric who works with him as an assistant professor at UNC, Dr. Timothy Sheahan. Sheahan, with financial and professional conflicts, remains on the Lancet COVID task force from which Peter Daszak was recently recused.

Sheahan has worked alongside Baric for nearly two decades, including working at his lab while in graduate school and later teaching at the same institution: the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Prior to the current likely lab outbreak of COVID, Baric and Sheahen were working with the for-profit biotech company Gilead Sciences to test the drug Remdesivir to treat coronaviruses.

If nothing else, this paints a continuing picture of the close relationship between the virology establishment, which is already rife with personal and professional conflicts, and the for-profit drug industry, where the credentialed doctors and professors are routinely paid to work as consultants and researchers. Baric's 2018 presentation makes it plain that these figures are all acutely aware of the opportunities for personal aggrandizement that this enviornment fosters.

Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal,

Biden administration officials are cautioning that a 90-day review into the origins of the Covid-19 virus may not produce a definitive explanation as intelligence agencies take on the challenge of unraveling the global pandemic.

Spy agencies conducting the review have yet to find conclusive evidence that would settle the debate over whether the virus came from human contact with an infected animal or was leaked from a Chinese government virology lab, a person familiar with the efforts said.

Did anyone seriously expect any other outcome? The WSJ just spent x amount of staff time -- though probably far less than it would had it wanted a different outcome -- to establish yet again that opinions are divided, there are different theories, nobody knows how COVID started, and that'll likely never change.

The Legacy Media And The COVID Origin Story

There's a particularly annoying offshoot of the TV true crime show, the unsolved murder genre. In this, a crew revisits yet again the scene of the crime and the relatives, still weepy and ready to cry on prompt after 30 years, to rehearse the whole unsolved routine one more time. With nothing new and the case getting older and older, there's little entertainment value other than to prove the continuing popularity of watching people cry on camera. I've always thought the interlocutors get a bonus for each time they can do it.

The odd thing is that legacy media coverage of the COVID origin story, just weeks after it became OK to cover it at all, is already starting to look like an unsolved murder show. There are different thories about how the virus arose. One of them, unconfirmed, is that it was engineered in a Chinese lab. But the Chinese will never cooperate with investigations, so we'll never know. Ain't it awful? Bob Baloney is in Minneapolis, where he interviews the niece of a man who passed away in 2020. . . and the boo-hoo rolls.

The latest version of this is in the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall (why would I pay for nothing?), but I found a summary here.

A Journal investigation found China resisted international pressure for an investigation it saw as an attempt to assign blame, delayed the probe for months, secured veto rights over participants and insisted its scope encompass other countries as well.

China withheld data on potential early cases and delayed sharing information on animals sold at a market where the first cluster was found.

The question of whether a lab accident was the cause of the pandemic remains unanswered. [Does it, really?]

International pressure for a fuller inquiry into the origins of the virus grows.

Other efforts to trace the path of the pandemic continue.

And Bob Baloney is in Minneapolis. The one question that nobody in legacy media is asking is why the whole Wuhan bat lab seems to have been funded by US actors through Peter Daszak's eleemosynary foundation. the EcoHealth Alliance. This has been reported almost exclusively by independent researchers and independent media. They've done their work almost entirely via diligent web searches of public documents, something legacy journalists have stopped doing.

And I hate to say it, but we learned not long ago about another hinky guy who laundered payments through non-profits and took a skim off the top, Jeffrey Epstein. There are money trails that need to be followed and haven't been.

Legacy media, including the Wall Street Journal, isn't asking any of the people on the US side, Fauci; Collins; Daszak; Auchincloss, Fauci's assistant; Andersen; Baric; or any of the other figures about any of this, though they must surely know as much if not more than the Chinese. But in the meantime, all these people have smartened up and have stopped speaking in public, not only to keep the virus money flowing but to avoid indictment.

Now, thanks to Natalie Winters at The National Pulse, one of those who uses public documents for research, Hunter Biden of all people has come into the story.

Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners – an investment firm led by Hunter Biden – was a lead financial backer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that has partnered with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

. . . Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “PREDICT” project, which seeks to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.”

As part of this effort, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study relating to bat infectious diseases in China. “Sensitive and broadly reactive RT-PCR assays were performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,” the paper notes.

. . . Researchers from EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota have also collaborated on presentations on how to “live safely with bats” and studies linking emerging infectious disease outbreaks to wildlife trade facilities including “wet markets.”

But wait. Rosement Seneca isn't a medical non-profit, it's a venture capital firm that aims to make a profit. It funded Metabiota for the same reason venture capitalists fund any startup, in hopes it will be the next big thing and they can take it public and make a bundle.

So this says, even excluding Hunter Biden, there's big potential money in bat virus pandemics. Big US money that's somehow involved in everyone getting sick with new diseases. There's going to be more to this story.

Come to think of it, yet another hinky guy's been in the news lately, John McAfee. Back in the day, when he was an innovator in the computer virus field, people said computer antivirus was a racket. McAfee's people were suspected of creating the same computer viruses their product was meant to cure.

Big money in that. Look where it took McAfee. Just sayin'.

The Bishops Are Beginning To Reclaim The Narrative

Posters like the one above were all the rage in student apartments after Humanae Vitae in 1968 -- I have clear memories from that time. In an era of anti-authoritarian rage, the Catholic Church was having difficulty making its case at all. Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, made news at the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome by joking, "He no playa the game, he no maka the rules." Although Cardinal Cooke demanded an apology, the Church was clearly on the defensive. A generation later, it was hit by the pedophilia scandal.

For whatever reason, this marked a roughly 50-year period in which the Church had little control over its public narrative. It's notable that over the past year or so, the Church is regaining its public voice via its bishops, something that had been envisioned in Lumen Gentium. The Church took a lead in filing lawsuits against COVID lockdowns that specifically limited worship in 2020. The decison by the US bishops to draft a teaching document that would clarify the relationship between eligibility for communion and politicians who claim to be Catholic but advocate policies against Church teaching is a major step.

Indeed, I don't think public ridicule like the Paul VI poster would gain the same traction in the current environment. Instead, we now see Abp Cordileone issuing a strong and insightful reply to Democrat House members who object to the bishops' vote:

The history of Catholic immigrants to the United States and their descendants is exemplary of the American dream, and intertwined with the Democratic party. I myself am a typical example of this Catholic Democratic legacy. My grandparents were immigrants, arriving here dirt-poor from Sicily. My father grew up in his father’s trade and was a commercial fisherman; my maternal grandfather was a cement mason. They were classic working-class people. Both of my parents were registered Democrats—New Deal Democrats—their whole lives. What the Democratic party, with its vital support for labor unions, brought to our country at the time helped my family survive and thrive, and made possible even greater opportunities for my siblings, my cousins, and myself.

It was a bit disconcerting, then, when on June 18, sixty Democratic members of Congress, all Catholics, issued a significant “Statement of Principles” in response to a decision by U.S. Catholic bishops to develop a teaching document on the nature of the Eucharist and its proper reception. In their statement, the members of Congress argue that “the Sacrament of Holy Communion is central to the life of practicing Catholics, and the weaponization of the Eucharist to Democratic lawmakers for their support of a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion is contradictory.” They go on to “solemnly urge” the bishops “to not move forward and deny [lawmakers] this most holy of all sacraments” over one issue.

The statement raises many troubling questions. While I speak only for myself in this column, the public nature of the statement invites a public response and provides an excellent opportunity for candid dialogue. In that spirit, allow me to begin the dialogue. . .

Abp Cordileone isn't alone. Abp Gómez issued a pastoral letter that was read from the pulpit at mass this week declaring a jubilee year to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of Mission San Gabriel near Los Angeles, cited Pope Francis's view that St Junipero Serra is “one of the founding fathers of the United States”, and made it plain that the Church Serra brought to Los Angeles and California will continue in the public dialogue. In his June 16 address tp the USCCB, he said,

We have been living through some extraordinary times. We’ve seen a pandemic shut down our civilization, including the Church, for more than a year. We’ve lived through riots in our major cities, rising social divisions and unrest, and maybe the most polarized election our country has ever seen.

. . . There are forces at work right now in our culture that threaten not only the unity of the human family, but also the very truth about God’s creation and human nature.

Our Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has said, “This is the age of sin against God the Creator.”

Pope Francis has stressed the truth of these words and said, “The problem is worldwide! The exploitation of creation, and the exploitation of persons. We are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of God.”

. . . May [Mary] help us to keep our hearts humble and united in the service of Jesus, as we seek to continue the evangelization of our country and our continent in this moment.

In his address, he makes the point that the Church can't think exclusively in poliical terms, but it must engage in the public dialogue. I don't think I've seen a public stance like this, at least in my adult life. The Church has finally begun to leave the defensive and take the initiative. I think Bp Barron's campaign to reinvigorate the actual texts and intent of the Vatican II documents, as well as Pope Francis's clear stance against pre-Conciliarism, are another part of this development.

More Thoughts On Wokeness

While thinking about the whiter-than-white TV commercials I've seen lately, I ran into an essay by Victor Davis Hanson, "Why Are They Woke?". This outlines the fundamental contradictions in current elitist thinking:

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them.

It's worth noting that the picture of Gov Northam above dates from a 1984 yearbook, incongruously a full generation after the US Civil Rights movement. Northam appears in another yearbook from 1981 with the nickname "coonman". Yet this was while Northam was in post-Civil Rights formation to become a doctor, a member of the elite. There are similar implications in President Biden's routine slips and gaffes, like the one just this past week where he said, “It’s awful hard, as well, to get Latinx vaccinated as well. Why? They’re worried that they’ll be vaccinated and deported."

You don't have to dig too deep to realize Hanson has a point. Another point he makes is that claims of vocal leftists to be "Marxist" ring hollow.

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

I'm in complete agreement with Hanson's underlying theme here, that the political philosophy that motivates current establishment thinking is completely incoherent and in some ways just opportunism, but it also represents a return, or an attempt to return, to the post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction consensus accommodation illustrated in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), where the post-Civil War southern social structure is the result of an alliance between southern segregationists and northern philanthropists who subsidize and control southern states by endowing local colleges and universities, while ensuring that northern cities keep the blacks who migrate from the south in ghettos.

Thus a feature of the Black Lives Matter movement, a drive to "defund the police", victimizes almost exclusively the people who live in those ghettos. It also stereotypes blacks by equating them with the lumpenproletariat, whom Marx thought, according to Britannica,

are not only disinclined to participate in revolutionary activities with their “rightful brethren,” the proletariat, but also tend to act as the “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.”

That the BLM riots of 2020 were brought about by an alliance of the criminal class and angry elites corresponds remarkably well with this characterization. Che Guevara could be fashioned into a revolutionary martyr; George Floyd was never any such thing. And indeed, while Che was dangerous to world order, George Floyd, a feckless addict and petty criminal, was completely safe -- except, of course, to those who had to live around him.

The people the elites fear aren't the George Floyds -- they stay in their own enclaves, and they keep the poor down by victimizing them almost exclusively. The people they fear are Marx's "rightful brethren", broadly speaking the actual proletariat, the plebs, over much of the West a combination of the working and middle classes.

This is reflected in the abject terror the January 6 demonstation at the US Capitol fostered in the political class -- months and months of urban rioting in 2020 hurt only the poor and minority entrepreneurs. A day of protest at the seat of government was not in the script and a completely different matter.

I think this is because the elites recognize that the broad post-Reconstruction racial accommodation that formed a good part of the US social structure for 150 years is slipping away. Accusastions of "systemic racism" are, as Hanson pointrs out, projection from elites who've been comfortable with those arrangements all along and who in fact want them to continue.

Minorities are recognizing that their interests lie with a broad social order that supports a productive plebs made up of the working and middle classes, not a segregationist system that depends on a criminal class that victimizes the poor. Thus the elites, steadily losing the support of workers and minorities, must shore up their consituency with an unlikely alliance of petty criminals, feminists, Malthusians, trustfunders, and sexual deviates.

This doesn't seem like a recipe for success.

Why Are The Commercials So White?

My wife and I record the TV programs we like and watch them the following night so we can fast-forward through the commercials. Still, this is an imprecise exercise, and it's still possible to be slow to initiate the fast forward or stop it too soon, so you still see some, which continues to convince me that the commercials alone on TV will lower your IQ by 20 points. (This reminds me that once on a plane, surrounded by a family with screaming kids, I gently reminded the mother that "studies show that if you allow your children to scream, it lowers their IQ by 20 points." She became very flustered and immediately began to shush them.)

Anyhow, trying to fast-forward through the commercials last night, I inadvertently glimpsed several. It suddenly dawned on me that, save the very occasional token African-American, everyone on every commercial was white. And not just sorta-kinda white, uber white, Aryan white, blonde, clear-skinned, trim, prosperous, and smiling with perfect teeth. And it also dawned on me that this is the wokest epoch in US history in the wake of George Floyd, and black lives matter more than ever.

Except commercials -- and make no mistake, advertising is integral to the media monolith -- are whiter than ever. Not only that, but figures like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have been purged in this latest surge of wokeness. Where, for instance, is the 2021 version of O J Simpson, a high-profile black spokesman for a major national brand? There are black spokesmen for items like athletic shoes, but those are products heavily favored by blacks.

The most successful US black politicians in history, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, are of mixed race and trace no descent from US slaves. In effect, they're tokens twice removed. Meghan Markle married into the UK royal family, but again, she's not all that black to start with, and rather than marrying in, she seems more intent on pulling her husband out, despite every indication that the royals were more than happy with her.

And of course, the US president and first lady are also about as white as you can get, indeed, stereotypically if not pathologically obtuse, with Biden rising in politics as a southern-state segregationist. The press secretary is a white woman, but not just white, upper-class white from Greenwich.

I can't offer a whole lot of explanation here, except a lot of this isn't necessarily new. I went to high school in Bethesda, second only to Greenwich as an upper-class enclave, and the schools there were segregated in the 1960s, a decade after Brown v Board of Education. Many of my schoolmates made careers in government, law, and the academy and took their attitudes with them. If anything, the events of 2020 have marked a return of the old elites -- the post-Civil War robber baron elites, if you get down to it -- to power.

The comnmercials are just a strange data point.

The COVID Timeline Expands

The New York Post revives a COVID origin question that had originally come up in May 2020, that COVID may have escaped from the lab earlier than previously assumed. The story from May 2020 reported,

A group of French athletes who competed in Wuhan back in October fear they may have brought the coronavirus back home — meaning that the deadly bug may have been around months earlier than first reported.

The French delegation took part in the seventh edition of the World Military Games in Wuhan from Oct. 18 to 27 last year, just 20 days before the first confirmed case of coronavirus in China, the Sun reported.

Wednesday's Post story says it wasn't just the French:

Members of Congress are calling on the Biden administration to launch an investigation into whether an international competition in Wuhan, China, involving thousands of athletes from around the world in October 2019 was the ​world’s ​first coronavirus “superspreader” event, according to a report on Wednesday. ​

More than 9,000 athletes, including a delegation of 280 athletes and staff from the US, attended the two-week-long Wuhan Military World Games, and many of them said they later fell ill with COVID-like symptoms, a Washington Post columnist reported in an op-ed.

Many of the athletes said ​Wuhan looked like a “ghost town” in October‚ two months before China reported the first case of coronavirus there.

. . . “Given unanswered questions surrounding the origins of the pandemic, information involving the health of service members who participated in the 2019 games could provide key evidence in understanding when COVID-19 first emerged,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) wrote​​ to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff​, the report said.

. . . The congressman also noted that Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he believes the coronavirus began in Wuhan in September or October 2019 and could have already been in the US by December 2019.

A web search suggests this story has been in the background, resurfacing now and then over the past year. For instance, a story in a Taiwan paper also reported in May 2020,

The RFA report pointed out that former Italian fencing Olympian Matteo Tagliariol also said that when he participated in the Military World Games, he and five roommates all got sick with symptoms often seen in COVID-19 patients and experienced a long recovery time afterward. He said his fever and difficulty breathing continued even a week after returning home.

Antibiotics did not work, and it took three weeks for him to recover. His son and partner also fell ill; then, a couple of months later, the coronavirus outbreak made the news.

The impression I've had from recent reports is that Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, was and continues to be closely involved in all gain-of-function research that EcoHealth funded at the Wuhan Institute to the tune of many millions of dollars. I've simply got to assume that Daszak's calendar and travel schedule, if nothing else, woud reveal near-constant interaction with officials at Wuhan and probably in the Chinese government between October and December 2020. '

If you ask me, the issue is not what Daszak knew, but what he told Fauci and Fauci's boss, Francis Collins, the NIH director. By January 31, we know that Kristian Andersen, a California virologist presumably out of the Fauci-Daszak-Collins loop, e-mailed Fauci that COVID looked engineered, something I would guess Fauci had known for months. The result was the February 1 conference call whose object was not so much to ask whether the virus was in fact engineered as to bring the virology establishment into the loop and keep things quiet.

While the agenda and notes of that meeting have so far been blacked out, it's not a stretch to surmise that the word was that if this gets out, all our grants are at risk. Let's keep this entre nous.

Just for starters, it looks more and more to me as though EcoHealth Alliance has a major legal problem if it covered things up between October 2019 and January 2020, as its failure to act in concert with public health authorities led to millions of deaths and many more sick and out of work.

My guess is that EcoHealth Alliance's general counsel has already been trying to explain this to the board. Sooner or later, Fauci, Daszak, and Collins are going to go down for this, though the eventual fallout will probably be much greater.

A Few Data Points

I note several stories that appear as puzzling data points, some or all of which may or may not be related. But if any of several are, something's going on.

• Warren Buffett has resigned as a director of the Gates Foundation. This may simply be because he's 90 and reducing his workload, or it may be in anticipation of what may come out in the Gates divorce case.
• The Lancet has acknowledged that Peter Daszak had a conflict of interest in items he published there. It has recused him from its commission investigating COVID's origins. Eventually EcoHealth Alliance will be forced to remove him as CEO, also due to conflict of interest.
• China is replacing its ambassador to the US with a man closer to Xi who has a harder-line style. This clearly has nothing to do with a rumored high-level defector.
• A new set of juicy stories has suddenly emerged from Hunter Biden's laptop, eight months after a first flurry. This clearly has nothing to do with rumors of a high-level Chinese defector who provided US intelligence with the contents of Hunter's laptop, which of course US intelligence already had.

The Hunter laptop story is especially puzzling. Initially reported in the New York Post, it contains photos and e-mails related to a 2018 stay by Hunter at the $700-a-night Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, in which he engaged the services of an escort, Yanna.

Yanna stays for a couple days and wants to be paid. The problem is Hunter’s debit cards aren’t working and she’s not leaving without the $8,000 he owes her for the extended callout. On the morning of May 24, hung over and out of sorts, Hunter adds a new recipient on the cash transfer app Zelle, a woman named Gulnora, the registered agent for Emerald Fantasy Girls and Yanna’s employer.

He transfers $8,000. It doesn’t work. A few minutes later, Wells Fargo sends him a fraud detection alert. He reaches into his wallet and pulls out a card. Yanna attempts to transfer the $8,000 but it apparently doesn’t go through. He rifles through his wallet again. No luck. He pulls out another card. Bingo.

Yanna leaves and he crashes. But while he sleeps, his bank accounts are being emptied. In receipts he saves on the computer, the transactions he thought had failed have gone through, one after the other. The first $8,000 is recorded leaving his account at 10:22 a.m. At 10:50 a.m., $2,000 leaves a different account. At 10:59 a.m., $3,500 vanishes. At 11 a.m., another $8,000. At 11:03 a.m., another $3,500. About $25,000 moves in under an hour. Another $3,500 is scheduled to transfer out later that afternoon but will be delayed.

Isn't that odd? None of his wallet full of debit cards will pay out, which given Hunter's lifestyle is no surprise. But all of a sudden, bam, within hours, all of the charges that were declined hours before suddently get paid, just like that. Yanna has to scramble to send back the extra money. But given Hunter's history, it's no surprise that there are even more new developments:

What we do know from the laptop is that a few hours after Hunter’s debit-card woes began, text messages start arriving that are labeled as being from Robert Savage III. Savage was once the Secret Service’s special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office and a contact card for him appears on the laptop, with a photographic avatar, phone number and Secret Service email address.

The Secret Service told The Post that Savage retired from the agency on April 30, 2018 — weeks before the Biden debauchery — and that the agency “did not provide protection to any member of the Biden family in 2018.”

Savage’s lawyer says, “My client has never met or communicated with Hunter Biden and has never been to the Chateau Marmont and had not even heard of the hotel. In fact, my client was retired before the date of these fabricated text messages.”

The activity recorded on Hunter’s devices shows Savage sending Hunter an urgent missive on May 24 at 6:37 p.m.: “H – I’m in the lobby come down. Thanks, Rob.”

Hunter replies: “5 minutes.”

Five minutes later, Savage texts again: “Come on H, this is linked to Celtic’s account. DC is calling me every 10. Let me up or come down. I can’t help if you don’t let me H.”

“Celtic” was Joe Biden’s Secret Service code name when he was vice president.

Did one of the credit cards used to pay Yanna belong to Joe Biden? Was it a shared account?

Hunter replies: “I promise be right down. Sorry.”

Five minutes later, Savage texts Hunter again to say that Dale Pupillo, a retired deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, who used to guard his father, has arrived. Invoices indicate that Pupillo did background checks for Hunter on potential business partners. Pupillo did not return requests for comment.

“He’s going to front desk, call and tell them to give us a key now H.

“As your friend, we need to resolve this in the immediate.

“Call the front desk now H or I will have to assume you are in danger and we will have to make them give us the keys.”

For nine minutes, Hunter does not reply.

“Really, Rob I am coming down right now,” Hunter texts at 6:54 p.m. “I really promise. Was in the bathroom buddy. Coming right this second.”

Thirty seconds later, Savage replies: “We’re at your door. Open it.”

What these apparent minders told Hunter next isn’t recorded on his devices. We know Hunter stays up the rest of that night, logging into an encrypted government site, “secure.login.gov,” a number of times until 4:04 a.m.

The big question for me is how this has become news just now, so long after the stories in October 2020, and even longer after the laptop had gone to the FBI. Indeed, Rudy Giuliani claims to have given a copy of the laptop to the Post last year. And this is the first we hear of this?

Oh, by the way, another recent story says Hunter was blacklisted from Chateau Marmont by July 2018, after the May escapade with Yanna. I wonder who was involved with that -- it came as a big surprise to Hunter.

Another question: who's able toi call retired Secret Service agents to clean up Hunter's mess? How are they able to exert authority on the hotel to give them the key to Hunter's room on their say-so, when none is working for the government?

Another question: Hunter, not at that time a government associate and with his father out of government office in 2018, gets to login to a secure government account. Why?

And clearly these new stories have nothing at all to do with rumors of a defector from Chinese intelligence who had a copy of Hunter's laptop. Not credible at all.

Reflections On Tne US Bishops' Vote

A quick recap, via the AP:

U.S. Catholic bishops overwhelmingly approved the drafting of a “teaching document” that many of them hope will rebuke Catholic politicians, including President Joe Biden, for receiving Communion despite their support for abortion rights.

. . . The result of the vote — 168 in favor and 55 against — was announced Friday near the end of a three-day meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that was held virtually.

. . . As a result of the vote, the USCCB’s doctrine committee will draft a statement on the meaning of Communion in the life of the church that will be submitted for consideration at a future meeting, probably an in-person gathering in November. To be formally adopted, the document would need support of two-thirds of the bishops.

I brought up my calculator and found that 168 plus 55 is 223, the total number of bishops voting. 168 is 75% of 223, so this is some indication of which way a vote on a completed draft might go. My first, overwhelming reaction is that this is not the caricature of US bishops held by rad-trad media. These are not a bunch of happy-clappy pedophile enablers.

The second thing I've noticed is how obtuse all media --legacy and independent, left, right, and whatever -- has been over this story. It's characterized as a move to "rebuke Biden" for his stand on abortion, when the references I've seen from bishops themselves indicate there's a much broader set of concerns including privileging transgenderism and same-sex activity, as well as issues like unisex restrooms.

A third takeaway is that things are changing. It appears that the USCCB is preparing to act on issues that had been on the agenda since communications from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from at least 2002. My impression of Abp Gómez both as president of the USCCB and as Archbishop of Los Angeles is that he has been an effective political actor in both church and secular environments, and he apparently feels this was a good time to act. I'm sure he brought the issue to vote knowing the result beforehand.

But the obtuseness in covering this news extends even to commentators who should know better. I found a piece on the Just the News aggregator that interviews Peter Kreeft, a widely published Catholic apologist who in my view gets things all wrong:

Peter Kreeft, a longtime Catholic apologist and a philosophy professor at Boston College, told Just the News that for Catholic authorities and theologians the issue hinges on the fact that the commission of a mortal sin doesn't necessarily determine "whether a person is in the state of mortal sin or not."

"The nature of the act itself is only one of the three requirements for a state of mortal sin, the other two being full knowledge in the mind and full consent in the will," Kreeft said.

"A prudential decision like this is not a matter of dogma alone, and therefore we usually find faithful Catholics on both sides of the debate," he continued, though he argued that "in the last few generations the Church has been much more reluctant than in the past to offer clear public witness to its unalterable doctrines when many people, even those who call themselves Catholic, say they are offended by them."

This is confusing at best. Speaker Pelosi insists that, having borne five children without presumably aborting any of them, she is eligible to receive communion whatever her views or public policy activity enabling it. Kreeft appears to agree.

But the sin in question isn't abortion, it's scandal. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is succinct in this:

2284 Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense.

This article at Catholic Answers expands on the passage:

The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor’s tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death.” Our Lord militates against scandal, and even ties a curse to those who promote it: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt 18:6).

The Catechism explains that scandal is greater according to the authority of the one scandalizing.

While the article concentrates on the responsibility of priests and bishops to speak correctly, there's an equivalent responsibility for Catholic elected officials to do the same. If some of the highest officials, like the president or the speaker, endorse abortion, same-sex activity, transgenderism and the like, they're implicitly saying these things are OK. If a lukewarm Protestant or an atheist endorses them, it's not the same as if a Catholic does.

And this is especially true when Catholic politicians are hitchhiking on the Catholic brand to get votes. If a politician claims to have been a Navy SEAL to get votes but the SEALs say he never was one, voters can make a more informed decision. I see no reason why this shouldn't extend to Catholics.

Peter Kreeft is 84. Perhaps he should finally retire and refrain from giving interviews.

Dr Fauci Says He's Not Hitler

A story from the weekend has Dr Fauci complaining to the New York Times that people call him Hitler. He insists this is not the case, he is not Hitler.

"The more extreme they get, the more obvious how political it is ... ‘Fauci has blood on his hands,’" the infectious diseases expert said of his critics. "Are you kidding me? ... Here’s a guy whose entire life has been devoted to saving lives, and now you’re telling me he’s like Hitler? You know, come on, folks."

This represents an escalation in Fauci's public defense, since earlier in the month he said only, "attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science." And I'm not aware of any public comparisons of Fauci to Hitler -- certainly not along the line of Trump or George Bush. So why bring it up?

Fauci continues to insist that his e-mails reflect only a willingness to evaluate new data as it comes in -- at one point, he believed masks were ineffective, but data suddenly arrived confirming that they were, so he changed his mind with The Science. But the e-mails that were revealed last month draw a more sinister picture. They reflect, for instance, what appears to have been a coordinated coverup with colleagues like Kristian Andersen and Peter Daszak to characterize the lab leak theory as conspiratorial and fringe, when acknowledging it from the start might well have saved time developing vaccines.

In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that the whole US-funded Wuhan project was focused on a particular set of bat viruses, engineered for transmissibility to and among humans in a particular way -- for instancre, via aerosol particles, not big, wet droplets. Fauci understood this as well as Daszak, Andersen, Collins, and other members of the club, and this was the reason for Fauci's early explanation that masks were ineffective.

But the narrative shifted to masks, first, to conceal what the COVID club knew, and also to create a visible impression on the public that something could be, and was being, done. But the public health measures like masks and distancing were window dressing and proved completely ineffective. By taking this course, Fauci concealed the club's complicity and caused much additional suffering and death, both by withholding information from vaccine developers and distracting from the need to find effective public health measures.

Beyond that, Fauci clearly advocated gain-of-function research that other virologists felt -- correctly in hindsight -- was risky and unnecessary. In 2012, he wrote that

the risky research could lead to serious lab accidents but the chance is rare and the work is “important” because it helps the scientific community prepare for naturally occurring pandemics.

Does he now believe a COVID world death toll of up to 5 million and rising was worth the risk? If so, I've got to think his views on scientific research are approaching the Hitler end of the scale. And the estimates of 3.5 to 5 million COVID deaths are also in Holocaust territory.

I tend to agree with the Chinese retort over holding them accountable for the COVID lab leak: hey, this was your research. You funded it. In fact, it looks as if you moved it to China to minimize the risk of a lab accident in the US.

It's likely that the main cause of Fauci's current unhappiness is simply that the media have stopped apotheosizing him. Questions are coming up, he's no longer useful as a foil to Trump, and he's a likely negative for the administration as events develop. On the other hand, it almost sounds as if may be responding now to belated promptings from his own conscience. The Hitler bit -- hey, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Gain Of Function Started In The US

The Fox News segment above from last Friday raises a little-noticed issue that's also been puzzling me: why had a pretty wide spectrum of US actors been funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab? The segment begins with China raising an issue that was bound to come up -- they're saying don't blame us, this is a US funded project. It covers this starting at abouit 2:55. but Laura Logan also makes the point that gain-of-function research had been a Fauci agenda item for a long time, even before it moved to China.

This sent me to searching the web. I found this article from November 2015 in Nature:

An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.

. . . The findings reinforce >suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought, the researchers say.

But other virologists question whether the information gleaned from the experiment justifies the potential risk. Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” he says.

It appears that the particular study in question here was done at the University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill, and it may have led in part to the moratorium on such studies between 2014 and 2017 that Fauci was able to bypass.

It's clear that the risks implicit in this research were well known and fully understood, and Laura Logan's point in the Fox segment is partly that it was sent to China to minimize the risk in the US. That sure worked.

I also went looking for the USA Today story cited in the Fox segment. The story by Alison Young was carefully isolated in the opinion section, and it ran on news dump Friday. It focuses on a February 1, 2020 conference call with Fauci and other gain-of-function researchers:

The teleconference on Feb. 1, 2020, appears to have played a pivotal role in shaping the early views of several key scientists whose published papers and public statements contributed to the shutting down of legitimate discussion about whether a laboratory in Wuhan, China, might have ignited the COVID-19 pandemic.

. . . Perhaps that’s because the early concerns among key scientists – like the conference call on Feb. 1, 2020 – were kept private until now. That call likely would have remained secret if not for documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

That teleconference was urgent enough it was scheduled on a Saturday afternoon.

. . . A day before the teleconference, Kristian Andersen, an expert in infectious disease genomics at the prestigious Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, had told Fauci first by phone and again later by email that the genetic structure of the virus looked like it might have been engineered in a lab.

. . . Andersen did not respond to repeated interview requests since last week. Late Thursday, a spokesperson said Andersen was traveling and unavailable.

Discussion of Andersen’s concerns had begun earlier on that Friday, Jan. 31, 2020, Fauci told me, when he had conferenced Andersen into a three-way call with Jeremy Farrar, director the Wellcome Trust, an influential and wealthy foundation based in London that funds global health research.

. . . “We agreed to convene by phone the next day,” Fauci told me. . . . Emails show the agenda for the one-hour meeting was short. . . . But details of what was said in the meeting, including extensive notes taken by one participant and further thoughts shared by others, were blacked out by the NIH before the emails were made public.

. . . Yet just three days after that Feb. 1 meeting, Andersen’s position on the virus’ potential origin changed dramatically. He had gone from having concerns about possible genetic engineering to telling another group of scientists “the data conclusively show” the virus wasn’t engineered, and calling suggestions of engineering “fringe” and “crackpot” theories.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fauci, once it became clear that COVID was an engineered virus developed in a Chinese lab in a US-funded funded project, engineered a consensus to distract attention from this information and deflect blame from the people behind the project.

More is bound to come out. The USA Today story is potentially explosive, but the aggregators and blogs have so far completely missed it.

Kabuki

Two data points in yesterday's news struck me in the wake of rumored reports of a Chinese defector with the goods on the Wuhan lab leak. The first was this story in The National Pulse, which has been consistently ahead of the game in its reports on COVID's origins and funding.

Google.org, the charity arm of the tech behemoth, has also been funding studies carried out by EcoHealth alliance researchers including Peter Daszak since at least 2010.

The decade-plus relationship is evident in a 2010 study on bat flaviviruses, which lists Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance Vice President Jonathan Epstein as authors, that thanks Google.org for funding. A 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, which was authored by Daszak, similarly declares it was partly “supported by Google.org.”

And a 2015 paper focusing on herpes, which lists EcoHealth’s Daszak and Epstein as authors, reveals it was “supported by funding from the US Agency for International Development’s Emerging Pandemic Threats: PREDICT program, the Skoll Foundation, and Google.org.”

The other data point is a report of White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan's interview on Friday’s “CBS This Morning”:

[U]ltimately, we need access and the international community needs access to China to be able to get that initial data that will tell us the most about where this virus came from and how it entered into the world. And you’re right, so far China has said, no, we won’t allow that.

But of course, if Dong Zingwei and two other defectors have actually come over with data on the Wuhan lab, we've already learned far more than we could ever hope to get from China no matter what. And the abrupt change in the Overton window of permissible discussion suggests something like this may have happened.

But even if it hasn't, don't we have a very good source of information at 520 Eighth Avenue, Suite 1200, New York, NY 10018, the headquarters of EcoHealth Alliance? How hard can it be for the funding agencies to ask for a complete audit? Who donated, for what, and where were the funds routed? If nothing else, this is a non-profit, apparently a very big and influential one. I doubt if Peter Daszak flies commercial. Might it be appropriate for the IRS to ask whether it's following all the rules?

All things considered, it's starting to look to me as though EcoHealth's board should already have hired outside counsel for an investigation, with Daszak already announcing he's leaving to pursue the usual. It's puzzling that nothing like this has happened.

It seems to me that somewhere on the list of important issues in the COVID story is the degree to which US agencies and foundations have been complicit for years in creating the conditions that led to Holocaust-level deaths and worldwide disruption. The complicity includes massive conflict of interest -- if Google was funding some of this work via its eleemosynary arm, no wonder its YouTube arm was suppressing stories about a lab leak. And again, I doubt if Daszak flies commercial. He and his colleagues have been living quite well under these arrangements.

What I'm seeing so far, though, is boy, we've got to get to the bottom of this! But WHO is on the case! And Biden has ordered a full report! We and our partners, indeed the entire international community, must press China for greater transparency!

This is kabuki. I'm not sure how long it can last.

Chinese Defector?

One of the aggregators has a headline that eventually traces back to a story at the RedState blog saying it's "confirmed" that a high-level Chinese counterintelligence official, Dong Zingwei, defected this past February and in part provided information that COVID was in fact a lab leak. It's no coincidence that the still from Topaz above has a big mirror overshadowing the scene, and neither legacy nor most of independent media seems willing to cover the story, so it is what it is.

This is actually the third supposed Chinese "defector" in recent months, the other two being Yan Limeng and Wang Liqiang. RedState has been the main reporter on these as well.

The RedState report on Dong says,

RedState’s sources confirmed that the defector is, in fact, Dong, that he was in charge of counterintelligence efforts in China, and that he flew to the United States in mid-February, allegedly to visit his daughter at a university in California. When Dong landed in California he contacted DIA officials and told them about his plans to defect and the information he’d brought with him. Dong then “hid in plain sight” for about two weeks before disappearing into DIA custody.

One of the strongest arguments for the authenticity of the Dong story is the sudden reversal of the received narrative on COVID's origin. As Victor Davis Hanson noted this week,

For over a year, the American establishment and media borg have ostracized anyone who dared to connect the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic with the Chinese military-sponsored, level-4 biosafety Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Then, suddenly and without apologies for their past demagoguery, “journalists” and “experts” concede that the nearby Wuhan lab may well be the most likely genesis.

Why the abrupt change?

It's also worth noting that the received version of Yan Limeng's story appears to have been overtaken by events. Her Wikipedia entry pretty clearly dates from before the Great Revision:

Li-Meng Yan or Yan Limeng (simplified Chinese: 闫丽梦; traditional Chinese: 閆麗夢) is a Chinese virologist, known for publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. These publications have been widely criticised by the scientific community.

. . . Since around February 2020, conspiracy theories as to the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have circulated on cable news and social media, including the idea that it had been manufactured in a laboratory.[15] This hypothesis was rejected by most scientists, who deem claims of laboratory origin to be implausible and lacking evidence. The laboratory leak idea may be related to political campaigns that utilize anti-Chinese sentiment and global geopolitical tensions.

Yan stated that evidence of genetic engineering was censored in scientific journals, allegedly as part of a conspiracy to suppress information on the topic. However, other scientists disputed the validity of the papers, pointing to poor methods, undisclosed funding from politically-motivated sources, the use of pseudonyms for the papers co-authors, and the paper having never been submitted to a journal for review. The papers were described by virologists as "non-scientific," "junk science," and written to spread "political propaganda."

The main takeaway I have from this story as it now stands is that control of the COVID narrative has been a high priority for the Chinese, and they've apparently now lost at least an initial skirmish, though they'd held the line for over a year. But US public figures like Dr Fauci and Peter Daszak had clearly been enabling the Chinese version for this entire period. We'll have to see whatever other shoes, if any, drop in coming weeks. But Boris Kusenov, the KGB defector in Topaz, certainly set important events in motion. This story has similar potential.

Take Us To Your Leader

Via the UK Daily Mail, I learn of another round in the debate about space aliens:

A group of astronomers are pushing back on humanity's preoccupation with communicating with aliens beyond our galaxy, warning that alien contact could result in 'the end of all life on earth,' physicist and science writer Mark Buchanan wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

I think the last time I brought up space aliens here, it was to cite Fr Sam, the smartest man I've ever met, who spoke in a homily about a question he raised in a session with seminarians: if we encounter space aliens, should we offer them baptism?

This is all a reminder to me that there's no real science or philosophy in the current talk about life on other planets. Fr Sam has this right. Nobody else does.

I was watching a TV show about the European Space Agency's Mars rover mission, which made the point that the agency is spending a billion euros to send a new-model rover to Mars for the specific goal of finding life there. This in fact has been a major purpose, if not the driving one, behind all Mars missions, and the most recent was named Perseverance, which can only be an indication of how frustrated the space elites have been at finding nothing of interest there to date.

An Italian scientist explained in the show I was watching that the problem has been that solar radiation has "sterilized" the top meter and a half of the Martian surface. However, the ESA rover will be equipped to drill a full two meters into the surface, which will be beyond the sterilized layer, and this will most certainly either bring up live microbes or fossils of old ones.

The narrator indicated this would be a major, major discovery. Except, first, it hasn't happend yet. Second, so what? On Earth, we keep finding microbes that live in boiling water or under Antarctic ice. The space elites have already told us this should make life possible in oceans under nitrogen ice on the moons of Uranus. Why should we even need to go looking for it? But if we don't find microbes two meters down on Mars, we can still have missions to the moons of Uranus anyhow. Nice work if you can get it.

The reason the space elites keep wanting to find microbes on Mars is that they think this will finally scorch away the unscientific, terracentric, homocentric Biblical world view once and for all. But there's a problem with their basic assumption. Let's go ahead and grant that the 83rd mission to the moons of Uranus drills through the nitrogen ice to find microbes in the ocean there. The technology in 2096 lets us not only find them, but bring them back.

Except there's a lab leak. Even by 2096, they haven't cured the problem of screwups. The Uranus moon microbes break out of the lab, but the life form is so different from ours that we haven't got the first clue on how to make a vaccine, and within two weeks, the Uranus moon virus wipes out all life on Earth.

Naturally, the space elites haven't figured this one out even now, which is why the scientists are writing worried op-eds. But the elites are acting under the unconscious assumption that the universe is benevolent -- as Bp Barron puts it, the universe acts in a way that can be understood, which is an argument for the existence of God. But this is also behind the science fiction fantasy that if there are space aliens, they'll also form intergalactic federations and either play the usual Earthbound political games or fight the usual Earthbound wars. Nobody's seriously thinking they're just gonna harvest the planet, eat everything, and move on.

The science fiction writers basically feed the thinking of the science elites; there's an assumption in particular that if a species is advanced enough to understand and manipulate the matter in the universe, light or dark, it's working under conditions in a consistent universe created by God, that this will be done by intelligent beings capable of reason, created in God's image. Otherwise, eveything is absurd. Among the absurdity is that the grants and tenured professorships and perks that go to the space elites are completely random, and any efforts they put forth to get or retain them are meaningless.

No matter how I circle around this, I can't escape from the conclusion that Fr Sam has this right -- if we run into space aliens, it's our duty to offer them baptism.

The Recovery Continues

Although our priests have been predicting this development for a while, the actual announcement comes as something of a shock (click on the image for a larger copy). Although there've been gradual loosenings -- indoor celebrations allowed, then no need for reservations, the choir gradually expanding, nevertheless, pews have still been roped off with six-foot calibrations in the aisles, and masks were required with temperatures taken on entry. No missals, no singing. Last week, one of our pew friends was still wearing two masks, not one, as Dr Fauci had instructed. I'll be interested to see how he responds this Sunday.

California mostly reopened on Tuesday, fully three months after other states like Texas. But it's worth noting that the UK, whose COVID performance has been equivalent to the US after vaccinations, got cold feet over a June 21 reopening and has pushed it back to July 19, although this may not involve lifting mask requirements even then. Meanwhile, Canada lags far behind even the UK, with Ontario maintaining strict limits on "non-essential" retail and even outdoor gatherings.

I think Gov Newsom would have extended COVID controls in a similar way in California had he not been subject to recall. By he same token, I don't think houses of worship would be able to reopen this way without the legal action the observant churches and synagogues brought last year.

But maybe just as significant, reality ride-along police programs are starting to make a tentative return to cable. Body Cam on Investigation Discovery appears to be the first of these, as we saw a new episode this week. Live PD, which was one of the most popular shows overall until A&E was forced to cancel it in the wake of George Floyd, has made no public announcement. Cops resumed limited production last fall to meet contract commitments outside the US but has made no other announcement.

Again, I think the COVID moral panic was directed at the plebs as the folk devils, with the moral entrepreneurs in the political and credentialed elites. The folk devils were the middle and working classes who objected to lockdowns or business closures, resisted masks and social distancing and threatened to hold block parties or family reunions or take vacations, notwithstanding the elites clearly felt entitled to do just those things. The BLM riots exploited the preexisting panic, adding the attribution of racism to whites among the plebs.

The problem for the elites is that as the panic subsides and the plebs is allowed to resume their jobs and the parties, reunions, and vacations -- indeed, to resume watching the police shows -- the country at large is beginning to ask what the fuss was about, as questions begin to come up about how the COVID panic took shape and for whose benefit.

A good example is this week's episode of Deadliest Catch, a reality show that's portrayed, among other things this season, how the COVID panic affected the Alaska crab fleet. (This sort of coverage is rare anywhere.) In this week's episode, Sig Hansen's daughter Mandy, who works as relief captain on his boat, has a false positive COVID test and has to go into quarantine until she can have two successive negative tests. The result is to delay the boat's departure and throw the whole operation into uncertainty until, after two days in quarantine and two negative tests, she can return.

This wasn't scripted, it was just how things happened with the camera watching. The result, with no judgment from writers or producers, was to show the destructive effect not of COVID but of the COVID panic. The plebs has gotten this messsage. It doesn't hurt that Mike Rowe narrates the series. The timbre of his voice alone reflects his underatanding, from bottom up, of how these things work.

I see ads on Facebook for a color-coded bracelet or amulet that lets people make it known what type of interaction they prefer post-COVID -- one color for handshakes, another for hugs, and so forth. I hope this dies a quick death, but it's an indicator of how profoundly the COVID panic affected everyone. There's going to be an adjustment to make in California, but I have the impression that people in Texas and Florida accommodated themselves to the old normal without much trouble.

Pope Francis On Rigidity

I said in yesterday's post that I wasn't sure what Pope Francis meant by "rigid" when he spole of rigid priests. This morning, looking for something else, I went to Church Militant and found an informative post, "Rigid" Seminarians. (I was originally looking to find the rad-trad take on the reported non-eucharist of President Biden from Francis, but intriguingly, Church Militant carries no mention of this.)

The post actually clarifies Francis's meaning quite helpfully:

[H]e offered [seminarians in Ancona] advice on four aspects of their seminary experience: the human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral dimensions. He extended his definition of rigidity to include "ritualism," saying "prayer is not ritualism — the rigid end up in ritualism, always."

. . . Regarding the intellectual life of a seminarian, Pope Francis advised them to study hard to encounter and "proclaim [their] faith and proclaim Christ." He made no mention of proclaiming the truths that Christ passed on to His apostles. Rather, it is proclaiming one's faith, which is a nebulous idea.

But worst of all, he secularized the role of the priest, saying, "Go enthusiastically to meet the people," adding, "One is a priest to serve the People of God, to take care of the wounds of all, especially the poor."

As it happens, I saw a Bp Barron video not long ago where he said to those who oppose Vatican II that in the Catholic Church, you don't get any higher authority than an ecumenical council. A few days later, I got an e-mail. from his Word on Fire organization promoting a collection of the Vatican II constitutions edited by Bp Barron and containing reflections from post-Conciliar popes and Barron as well. So I sent for a copy. I've been working my way through Lumen Gentium.

Lumen Gentium strikes me as an extended explanation of the Church's whole function, dwelling especially on the roles of bishops. priests, deacons, and laity. Without question it gives bishops and priests a sacramental and pastoral role, but it also specifies an evangelical role. I would note that the post at Church Militant makes the point that Francis touched on the human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral dimensions of the priesthood. We must assume he spoke of pastoral and sacramental roles elsewhere in his address.

But certainly intellectual abilities are key for evangelism. G K Chesterton, Fulton J Sheen, and Bp Barron were and are all smart men. As far as I can see, Francis's reasoning is that since the Church has an evangelical role, its priests must prepare themselves intellectually for that role.

And in in section 17 of Lumen Gentium, we see:

As the Son was sent by the Father, so He too sent the Apostles, saying: "Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world". The Church has received this solemn mandate of Christ to proclaim the saving truth from the apostles and must carry it out to the very ends of the earth. Wherefore she makes the words of the Apostle her own: "Woe to me, if I do not preach the Gospel", and continues unceasingly to send heralds of the Gospel until such time as the infant churches are fully established and can themselves continue the work of evangelizing.

In section 28, we see

Because the human race today is joining more and more into a civic, economic and social unity, it is that much the more necessary that priests, by combined effort and aid, under the leadership of the bishops and the Supreme Pontiff, wipe out every kind of separateness, so that the whole human race may be brought into the unity of the family of God.

My take from reading Lumen Gentium is that it characterizes the Church as an extension of heaven into this world, and to be this faithfully, it has to face outward. What Francis is telling the seminarians in Ancona strikes me as unexceptionable post-Conciliar Catholicism. When I listen to Bp Barron on the problem of pre-Conciliarism in the Church, I've got to think Church Militant's objection to Francis's remarks on "rigidity" fits Barron's characterizations.

According to Wikipedia, "This dogmatic constitution was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on 21 November 1964, following approval by the assembled bishops by a vote of 2,151 to 5." It appears that for whatever reason, writers at Church Militant are deeply uncomfortable with it. If so, I can't disagree with Bp Barron that there's a problem here.

Will Pope Francis Suppress The Latin Mass?

There's been lots of speculation recently, for instance here, that Pope Francis is on the verge of revoking Summorum Pontificum. I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm a Catholic convert to the post-Conciliar Church, and I've never been to a Latin mass (if you leave out the one my mother took my sister and me to in the 1950s).

Beyond that, our pastor turned my view of Pope Francis on its head a couple of years ago, when he gave a homily on the passage in John 21 where the risen Christ recommissions Peter on the shore of a lake. He said the Peter we see in that account reminds him a great deal of the Holy Father we have now: often impulsive, even clumsy, but utterly genuine. Francis is the pope we have, just like all the others. My takeaway at this point is that as a convert, I need to avoid trying to be more Catholic than the pope.

We have a highly successful novus ordo parish. We came into the Church via another parish that was less successful, though I've heard they're improving. After two years there, we went looking to see what else was available, and we found this one within a couple of miles. It's anything but the novus ordo stereotype. In some ways, without being self-conscious or self-congratulatory, it out-Episcopalians any of the Episcopal parishes we used to attend. The cantor at our mass is a professional soprano whose day job is singing opera and Broadway.

Our pastor and a succession of associates and priests in residence are extremely capable and inspiring men who would succeed at other careers -- the pastor worked at an accounting firm before following his vocation. I would summarize their message as go to mass; go to confession; get/stay married unless you have a vocation, which is something you must take seriously; study scripture; read the Catechism; go to adoration; give to the parish and the archdiocese; keep your sense of humor.

Given that, I simply don't see what the Latin mass brings to the party. Since I've never been to a contemporary Latin mass or gotten to know a TLM parish, I don't know what I could be missing, but it would have to be so muich better than our parish that it would also be woth an extra 30-minute drive. By the same token, I've never had first-hand experience of the downside to a rad-trad parish. Bp Barron is clear that this exists. He's taken aback by the vehemence, discourtesy, and anger of on line comments against him. He often engages atheists, agnostics, and non-Catholics, but the people who consistently denounce him are the rad-trads.

His position is that if you like the Latin mass because you like the Latin mass, more power to you. But I wonder how many of those there actually are, vis-a-vis people who are maybe overcompensating for something else, with anger as part of the package.

I did get some exposure to people who are at least first cousins of TLM rad-trads when I investigated Anglicanorum coetibus on the old blog. The original target audience was disgruntled Episcopalians from the "continuing" movement of the 1970s and 80s, but few took this up, and by default, the target audience has changed to disgruntled rad-trad cradle Catholics, who like a concocted super-long liturgy that includes all the extra Anglican prayers with all the extra verbiage of Eucharistic Prayer I in the Catholic English mass, with a thorough sprinkling of thee-thou archaisms.

And although I stopped updating the old blog late last year, I still get angry and abusive e-mails about it. This suggest a mindset not too far from the angries who beset Bp Barron in comment sections. Just last week I heard from a guy who insisted that Catholic ladies wear chapel veils all the time, and I was completely off base to suggest that ordinariate parishes use them as an ostentatious marker that they're with a rad-trad program.

All I can say is that Pope Francis speaks against "ritualism", and if he means making a fetish of a particular liturgy as a form of overcompensation, I've got to say he has a point. He also says he doesn't want "rigid" priests. I'm not sure what he means by that. I'm not sure if St Peter always carefully explained himself, either. However, I don't think either Abp Gómez or Francis himself would call any of the priests who've passed through our rectory "rigid". They simply encourage us to study and practice the faith and be good Catholics.

At this point, nobody can be sure if the pope actually intends to suppress the Latin mass, or what measures, if any, he may take short of that. It really won't affect me or our highly successful parish. But after all, he's the pope, just like all the others.

Why Does Peter Daszak Tell Lies?

In court, a jury instruction you often see is that if a witness is shown to have lied in one part of his testimony, the jury is entitled to doubt his veracity about any other part of his testimony. This is one reason I'm scratching my head about all the public statements key figures in the Wuhan scandal keep making, when people in their situation should be maintaining a low profile. This applies to Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, which bundles grants from US agencies and allocates them to Chinese virology labs.

In a post last week, I noted that Daszak has insisted he didn't fund gain-of-function research that made viruses worse and more contagious, when he's on video explaining that gain of function is exactly what those labs do. Now, over the past weekend, Sky News Australia found video of live bats in cages at the Wuhan virology institute, when Daszak had previously denied this was done:

A member of the W.H.O. team investigating the origin of the pandemic in Wuhan, zoologist Peter Daszak said it was a conspiracy to suggest bats were held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and no evidence existed to support the allegation.

In one tweet dated December, 2020 he said: “No BATS were sent to Wuhan lab for genetic analysis of viruses collected in the field. That’s now how this science works. We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!”

Two things strike me. The first is that the guy is simply telling an outright untruth. But the second is that the untruth is dressed up in animal-rights virtue signaling -- no bats are harmed in our research! We gather their viruses and release them! The fact that millions of humans have been harmed in the course of this same research goes unmentioned. This goes to the strange anti-humanist environmentalism that seems to surround this whole field of pandemic research. It's more important that we seem to care about animals than that we recklessly endanger humans. But the whole pose is a lie.

The poster at the top of this post reveals another puzzling aspect of pandemic research. One of Daszak's colleagues in this tight little group, Ralph Baric, gave a presentation in 2018 entitled "Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!”. Isn't it odd that both Daszak and Baric represent their field as helping us to prevent flu pandemics, when in fact they seem to have funded the lab whose leak resulted in one of the worst flu pandemics ever?

At minimum, if I attended either of the presentations by Daszak or Baric, I think I'd ask for my money back. There's something really hinky here, and it's not just Daszak.